Cosmic radiation includes high-energy atomic particles. Collisions between particles of cosmic radiation and atoms in the Earth's atmosphere may create a cascading chain of secondary atomic particles. Additional atomic particles may be generated by collisions in the environment of an integrated circuit, such as the packaging of an integrated circuit.
The secondary particles may include a trail of charged particles within an integrated circuit. The cumulative electric charge of the trail of charged particles may be injected into a node of an integrated circuit. Enough electrical charge may be delivered to the node to change the electrical value of the node. For example, enough charge may be delivered to a storage node of a memory cell to change a binary value that is stored in the memory cell.
Typically, cosmic radiation does not cause permanent damage to an integrated circuit. An error in operation of an integrated circuit from cosmic radiation is often denoted a soft error because the integrated circuit may resume normal operation after a reset of the integrated circuit. However, cosmic radiation may cause lasting corruption of data processed by an integrated circuit.
The effects of cosmic radiation generally increase with altitude above sea level. Thus, the effects of cosmic radiation are of special concern for integrated circuits in aerospace applications.
The design of an integrated circuit may include assessing the vulnerability of the integrated circuit to cosmic radiation. If the targeted reliability of an integrated circuit is not achieved, the design of the integrated circuit may need to be modified to increase the tolerance for cosmic radiation.
Because a particular integrated circuit may operate for many years without any detectable effects from cosmic radiation, measuring the sensitivity of an integrated circuit to cosmic radiation may be time consuming and difficult. Artificial sources of high-energy atomic particles may be used to reduce the time required to affect the operation of an integrated circuit. However, it may also be time consuming and difficult to predict the sensitivity of an integrated circuit to cosmic radiation using measurements obtained from artificial sources of high-energy atomic particles.
The present invention may address one or more of the above issues.